How Septuagint highjacked the Geography of Egypt?

The Septuagint replaced the name Msrim in the so-called “Hebrew” text with the name “Aegyptus” in their Greek translation. By doing so, they created the illusion of association between the Israelite and Egypt.

After Alexander’s successful conquest during the 4th Century B.C, his empire consisted Mesopotamia, West India, Persia, and Egypt. As a result, the Greek language became the language on the “tongue of the world”, from horizon to horizon. It was in that era that King Ptolemy Philodelphis (a.k.a Ptolemy II), King of Egypt under Greek mandate, commissioned a group of Jewish priests living in the city of Alexandria to translate the Old Testament from Aramaic to Greek. The priests, who numbered around seventy, took it upon themselves to achieve this task, the first of its kind in the history of the old world. Their translation became known as the Septuagint Bible, in reference to the seventy or so rabbis who brought it to the world.

Eventually, the Greek Bible was born, almost a millennium before the Arabs conquered that land under ‘Umar. And it was in this Greek translation that the great forgeries which would later become rampant in the world as unquestionable truths were born.

In addition to the forgery that was perpetrated via the translation, the Septuagint text also added entire new passages which were not found in the original Aramaic Bible.

In fact, Jim Cornwell, in his book “History of the Bible” (1998), points to many of those new passages; among which is the story of Eve being created from Adam’s rib and bearing the blame for the loss of Paradise. It was from that point onward that rabbinical Judaism regarded the woman as an inferior and “cursed” being, rather than the half that completes the man. Centuries later, this belief found its way to the “Islamic” books of Hadith and tradition, where one can find many narrations demeaning to women and their status in society.

And one of the greatest forgeries originating in the Septuagint translation was the replacement of the name Msrim (or Mtzrim), which appeared in the original Aramaic text, with the Greek name Aigypto, thereby transferring the events surrounding the life of the Patriarch Abraham and his descendants from their original location to the Nile Valley which, at the time of the translation, was ruled by the Greek Ptolemaic Dynasty.

So let’s examine the texts of the Old Testament, to see what their black hands wrote to the world. Take, for example, any passage or sentence from the Bible that contains the term Mtzrim, in order to see just how this great delusion was born.

Let’s take the following passage, from Genesis 21:21.

וישׁב במדבר פארן ותקח־לו אמו אשׁה מארץ מצרים

The last word on the left (Aramaic is read from right to left, like Arabic) will be the center of our attention. First, let’s spell the word in the so-called “Hebrew” language and then see how it is rendered in the Greek translation:

The first letter: “מ" is “mem”, pronounced “m”.
The second letter: "צ" is “tzade”, pronounced “tz”.
The third letter: "ר" is “resh”, pronounced “r”.
The fourth letter: "י" is “yod”, pronounced “i” or “y”.
The fifth letter: "ם" is also “mem” (as it’s written when it comes at the end of a word).

Reading the whole word, מצרים , we get: M – tz – r – i – m (Mtzrim), which is how the name is pronounced in the modern “Hebrew”. Now the question is: How did the Septuagint priests translate this name into Greek?

Let’s take the same passage (Genesis – 21:21), and study it again, this time in Greek:

The last word on the right (Greek is read from left to right), in the context of the passage, clearly designates the name of a land, and is therefore a proper noun. Again, using any vocal glossary for the pronunciation of Greek letters, let’s spell it out:

And there you have it: The “translation” of what is clearly a proper noun, Mtzrim, a name that was not very well-known at the time, to Aigypto, a very well-known name that was recognized by every child and adult in the East and the West of the globe. This is the land of Egypt as it is pronounced in English and al-Qibt as it is known - or should be referred to - in Arabic. Here is the English translation of that same passage:

And he dwelt in the wilderness of Paran (Pharan), and his mother took for him a wife from the land of Egypt. (Genesis – 21:21).

And so it was the famous land of Egypt and its great civilization, that were hijacked by a pack of Ptolemic Jewish priests, who wrote a book with their own hands and called it “the Holy Bible”. No sooner had the name Mtzrim been replaced with Aegypto, that the entire culture of the Nile Country became a heritage owned by the Children of Israel, and a theater for the events surrounding Mūsa (P) and Far‘awn.

Try to visualize the fame and renown that was gifted to the Ptolemaic Dynasty when their land was imagined, by the whole world, as the theater of the “Holy” events surrounding the Children of Israel! It was all perpetrated for the mutual benefit of the Greeks and the Jewish priests whom they commissioned to translate the original text.

As for the name Mtzrim / Msrim, which appears in the original Aramaic text, does not necessarily correspond with the Arabic term Misr which appears in the Qur’ān. This is because the Qur’ān is a radically Arabic document, and is independent in its usage of terms from the previous scriptures. It is enough to understand that the term Mtzrim / Msrim designates the tribal identity of a clan that lived in the same region or territory as the ancient Israelite.

Dr. Ashraf Ezzat wrote in article titled “Debunking the Israelite Myth: Ancient Egypt Knew No Pharaohs” that “In the mid-nineteenth century the genuine version of the history of ancient Egypt and the Near East was beginning to unravel as its true stories were being retold again.

Ironically enough, what the excavated records of ancient Egypt told the modern historians and archeologists was totally different from what the Hebrew narrative said. But what struck historians as a total surprise is the fact that ancient Egyptian records had no mention of any Israelite in Egypt, none whatsoever, while the Hebrew Bible is replete with tales of Egypt, and the more of ancient Egypt texts and inscriptions were unraveled, the remoter from truth the Biblical narrative looked.”

THE NORTH-ARABIAN MUSRI AND THE OLD TESTAMENT MISRAIM.—The cuneiform inscriptions of Assyria have thrown considerable light on various geographical localities in North Arabia, having important bearing on the history of the ancient Hebrews and on the critical study of the Old Testament. The importance of these new facts and researches has of late assumed very bewildering proportions, the credit for which unmistakably belongs to Winckler, Hommel, and Cheyne. It is needless to say that however ingenious these hypotheses may appear to be they are not as yet entitled to be received without caution and hesitation. Were we to believe, in fact, the elaborate theories of these eminent scholars, a great part of the historical events of the Old Testament should be transferred from Egypt and Chanaan into Arabia; for, according to the latest speculations of these scholars, many of the passages in the Old Testament which, until recently, were supposed to refer to Egypt (in Hebrew Misraim) and to Ethiopia (in Hebrew, Kush) do not really apply to them but to two regions of similar names in North Arabia, called in the Assyro-Babylonian inscriptions Musri or Musrim, and Chush, respectively. They hold that partly by means of editorial manipulation and partly by reason of corruption in the text, and in consequence of the faded memory of long-forgotten events and countries, these two archaic North-Arabian geographical names became transformed into names of similar sound, but better known, belonging to a different geographical area, namely, the Egyptian Misraim and the African Chush, or Ethiopia.

According to this theory, Agar, Sarai's handmaid (Gen., xvi, 1), was not Misrite or Egyptian, but Musrite, i.e. from Musri, in northern Arabia. Abraham (Gen., xii, 10) did not go down into Misraim, or Egypt, where he is said to have received from the Pharaoh a gift of menservants and handmaids, but into Misrim, or Musri, in northern Arabia. Joseph, when bought by the Ismaelites, or Madianites, i.e. Arabs, was not brought into Egypt (Misraim), but to Musri, or Misrim, in north Arabia, which was the home of the Madianites. In I Kings (A. V., I Sam.), xxx, 13, we should not read "I am a young man of Egypt [Misraim], slave of an Amalecite", but of Musri in north Arabia.